


And All Places Are Alike to Me

by the_rck



Category: Homeward Bounders - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Teaching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:14:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23223094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/pseuds/the_rck
Summary: Helen started it, of course. I don't think I'd have agreed if it hadn't been her asking.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 18
Collections: All The Nice Things Flash Exchange 2020





	And All Places Are Alike to Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Etnoe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etnoe/gifts).



> Title from Rudyard Kipling's "The Cat that Walked by Himself."

Helen started it, of course. I don't think I'd have agreed if it hadn't been her asking.

"I want to send someone with you," she said during my fifth visit After. She must have recognized my expression because she added hastily, "Not permanently!" She held up her hands in a warding gesture. She didn't say more for quite a while, just walked next to me through the dusty halls of her temple.

We'd tried walking in the place she called a garden during my second visit. Half of it was sand and stone and meant for meditation. The other half was... more exciting. In a 'the shrubbery will definitely try to eat you' sort of way.

Helen said it was good practice for dealing with the rest of her world. "I don't want anyone thinking that walking around out there is _safe_."

Every time after that, when she offered a walk in the garden, I refused. I was polite about it because her guards always thought I might be some sort of weird, magical assassin. I didn't age, and my visits always made her cry.

I wasn't supposed to know about the crying part, and I suppose I really don't know. I just... Helen always hated being helpless.

And I cried, too, after those visits, once I'd crossed the Bounds and knew she wouldn't see or hear me. Each time, I told myself that I'd take longer coming back. Fewer visits would hurt less, and eventually, there wouldn't be a reason to visit. I'd just pass through the way I did most places.

I tried not to learn the names of Helen's students and assistants. Knowing them wasn't going to help me any.

"No, really," Helen said at last. "They don't understand what walking the Bounds means. They don't understand how different it is in each world. It's... Knowing that, knowing you, I'm better at everything here because of it." She turned and looked at me full on. I could see the weight of her decades bending her, just a little.

I was pretty sure she was over fifty. I never asked. Partly because she'd assume I was making fun of her for being old and partly because I didn't want to know how close I was to losing her. We never talked about her getting older or about me not. We just knew.

"I don't want to do that to somebody." I met her eyes then looked away because I could tell that she knew that I didn't want to do that to myself.

If I traveled with someone, I would know them, and I would lose them the same way I was losing Helen.

But she didn't stop asking. She also didn't stop insisting that I'd be helping her. "Whoever comes after me has to know all of that. You taught me; you can teach them."

"It's cruel," I told her.

"I know," she answered. "That doesn't mean I'm wrong." She sighed. "Once, Jamie, please. Try it once. If it's that bad an idea, well... Eternity is long. It'll be a passing bad idea."

My first student was a very nervous looking twelve year old boy named Hector. His eyes were too big for his face, and he kept trying to bow to me. It took three weeks to get him to call me 'Jamie.' He had no other name for me and no title, but he didn't want to call me the same thing that Helen had, so he avoided calling me anything at all.

I think he thought I was a god or a demon, something not-human anyway.

At three weeks in, I deliberately got myself arrested. It was one of those worlds where a person needed papers, so it wasn't hard, and the worst that was going to happen was me getting shoved into a workhouse for a few days.

Easy peasy.

But Hector didn't know that, and I knew that Hector didn't know that. Hector was also more terrified of Helen than he was wary of me.

He still thought he could change his mind and go home any time he wanted to. The difficulties of finding any particular place, the way that it would never actually be home again, those lessons were still ahead of him.

I had to get into stupid levels of trouble four times before Hector yelled at me.

It was really beautiful. He waved his hands in the air and used words that Helen had never taught me. When I laughed at him, he took me by the shoulders and shook me. Afterward, he looked ashamed, but he started treating me more like I was human.

My second student was a girl named Raquelle. She was eight and grimly determined. She shaved her head once every three days. The process was kind of terrifying.

Joris insisted that I needed balance that way. He also said that I shouldn't get all my students from one place. He said it as if me having students at all was a settled thing. "They also shouldn't all come from worlds where you have friends," he told me. "If they do, it'll make letting our worlds go that much harder." He eyed Hector who was busy making awkward conversation with Konstam's youngest daughter. "He looks at you the way the apprentices look at Konstam."

I could hear the laughter in Joris's voice. I flapped an irritated hand at him. "Don't even think that! I'm trying to make him want to go back to Helen. Nobody ever looked at her like that."

Joris shook his head. His expression softened into something nearer grief. "You just haven't been there to see it."

I looked away because he wasn't wrong.

"Raquelle wants to be a demon-hunter," Joris said after a pause long enough for it to be clear that I wasn't going to say anything more. "She could. She's stubborn enough. It'll just never come easy for her, and she'll die young. I can sell this to her as a different sort of apprenticeship. You'd be doing me a favor."

So I left Joris's world with two ducklings following after me.

Three of us really was better than two. Raquelle and Hector distracted each other because Hector wanted to protect Raquelle while Raquelle wanted Hector to treat her with the respect she deserved.

They were both so very young. I didn't want to watch them get older, and I also couldn't bear for them not to.

My third student chose me. Well, really, she chose us. She was an adult, a peddler, who noticed us and watched us and realized that we didn't have a grown up with us. She invited herself along.

Normally, I'd have left her behind at the Bounds, but it was kind of a relief to have someone in the group who started from the assumption that I was ordinary. I asked her, when we got to the Bound, whether she was willing to travel to strange lands with us. I knew that she didn't understand and that her laughing and ruffling my hair as she told me that she didn't have anywhere else to be wasn't the same as real agreement. I took her with us anyway.

Her name was Sita. Later, much later, she was the first to choose walking the Bounds on her own over going back to the world she came from. She laughed at me again, then, and ruffled my hair; I knew she was remembering. "I don't have anywhere else to be," she told me. "Nowhere better, either. It's just a different sort of traveling."

We met on the road from time to time after that. The second time, she had a student of her own. She waved me over and said, "I'm trying to explain how you know what's safe to trade on a new world."

I had opinions on that, so I stayed with them through three worlds.

Some of her students settled on one world or another, but some kept walking the Bounds. Some of them traded. Some of them sang. Some of them explored. They all wanted the Bounds.

Helen sent one more boy out with me before we lost her, and there was a girl waiting at Helen's temple when I brought the boy back. Lys told me that she was lucky. She'd put her name in for a chance, and out of twenty-three volunteers, she'd been selected when she pulled the marble with an anchor on it out of the urn.

"I cheated," she told me. "They said we could. Well, we could if we didn't get caught. If we couldn't pull it off, we obviously weren't lucky enough to deserve a chance." She smiled, and I thought that she was almost as clever as she thought she was. She needed a different set of lessons than Hector had, so I let her find the stupid levels of trouble for herself. I let her figure out ways to escape that trouble, too.

Lys was the first to call walking the Bounds a holy calling. I took her home the way I had Hector, the way I had Raquelle. Lys spent six years there, waiting for me to come by again. When I did, she bowed to me in front of everybody and announced that the Bounds were the path to knowledge of the Gods.

I had no idea what she meant, but the line seemed to go over big with the other witnesses.

She left the world by a different Bound than the one I normally took. She didn't look back. She didn't expect me to follow, and I didn't. I thought she was making a terrible mistake, but I'd known her long enough to know that she would have to learn that herself.

I understood Sita's reasons for walking the Bounds immediately. Understanding Lys's took decades.

Sita's students see each step as an opportunity to know many places. The Bounds give them enough that they don't notice any cost. They want to see what's over that hill and around that bend. It's new and always a thing they can choose.

Lys's students find the sacred in leaving their homes to guard the Bounds. They don't do it for their homes and families. They know they won't be able go back. "The river is never the same twice," they say, and they actually understand what it means. It's a deliberate sacrifice to thank the Bounds and to try to become one with them.

Some from each group stop, eventually, because they started without understanding what it actually meant, but some keep going. Enough keep going, and they teach, too. They find willing people in every world. There's always someone suited for one path or another.

I can feel it, now, when the Bounds accept another traveler and when the Bounds release a traveler who intends to settle. I know when one of them is in the sort of trouble that requires outside help. I know when the Bounds expand, too, and when they contract.

Mostly, they grow, but sometimes worlds merge. Once in a while-- very, very rarely-- a world dies. I know, now, when that's coming. As far as I can tell, it's a natural part of things. I stopped worrying too much about it once I was sure that Bounds stop letting people into those worlds but continue letting people out. No one's getting trapped.

I can also feel _Them_ outside and trying to find a way in. _They_ don't push as often as they did when it was only me, but _They_ 're not gone.

 _They_ hope that we'll forget or that we'll get tired and give up. On my own, I might have because I held the Bounds through grief, despair, and loss. I looked at what I didn't-- could never-- have, and the weight of that condensed everything into stability. I have held on for a very, very long time, mostly out of spite, but I'd have crumbled eventually. 

People aren't meant to be alone, and I thought I had to be.

My students and their students hold the Bounds with joy and determination by accepting all worlds as wonders and possibilities. The worlds are becoming larger and more real through that acceptance than I could ever have made them with my pain. I was determined; I wasn't resilient.

Seeing all worlds as equally Home works as well as seeing all worlds as equally not-Home. I still don't know if Helen guessed. I wouldn't have believed her if she'd told me.

I still walk the Bounds. I could stop, though, if I ever found a place that seemed like Home. It's just that walking has become less a burden and more... The others all chose, and they all know my name. None of us _have_ to walk alone. Some of us do, but there's usually help if we need it.

I know how many are walking the Bounds. Lys knows where each one is. Sita can make the Bounds call whoever's near enough to help. Some of the others, the ones who've been walking the longest, have their own particular gifts in how they interact with the Bounds.

I think we're all going to be okay.


End file.
